Skin Prayer

by Doug Rice

Doug Rice is haunted-by what we can only guess. He is trapped; he goes nowhere. He is a modern day hysteric, a psychoanalyst's dream. He writes the same thing over and over, runs the same spinning track, as if somehow, through the repetition of extremes, he could eliminate the trauma, break its foul-smelling, icy-fingered spell. Only it is a spell of beauty --the beauty that comes from devastation, from the constant struggle to rise again in that roaring fire's shouldered wake. You will find no plot or answers here, only the unbearable loss of abandonment and grief. Make no Doug Rice kills us again and again and he does not want us to survive it, for he has been burned at the stake and is burning still. He is a ghost who can do nothing but plead with his bones and remind us with the choking beauty ghosts bring. Despite his pleas, you will not like him. You will not like him, and yet . . .Skin Prayer is the power of redemption in the word when life has failed us. It has no inside or outside, it is only itself. It is the self-enclosed, hermetic world of obsessive need, a space where one can't breath. And yet it is breath. In its own suffocated space, if we survive it, or are patient enough not to throw it aside, it gives us insufferable hope.

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, The Sacred Book of Silence (translated into the German as Das Heilige Buch der Stille), Blood of Mugwump (translated into the French as Le Sang des Mugwump), Skin Prayer: fragments of abject memory, and A Good CuntBoy is Hard to Find. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies qnd journals including Dirty: Dirty, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Alice Redux, Kiss the Sky, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, Fiction International, and others. He is the recipient of an Arts Residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) 2010-2012. He teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies. He has a B.A. from Slippery Rock State College, studied for an MA under John Gardner at SUNY-Binghamton, has an MA from Duquesne University and studied for his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[J.C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read something of his for some time now, and I seriously had to take my time while reading this. Each individual sentence (sometimes containing only one word) must be contemplated over. I can't say I got everything, because i'm pretty sure a lot of it did fly over my head, but I got the jest of it I think. I really enjoyed reading it out loud too, so I recommend doing the same.


So my advice when reading this is to take your time, don't get frustrated, and if you DO happen to get frustrated (part of the reading process), THINK HARDER, as the book suggests.